The firm's founder and CEO, Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares, took credit for what he called "one of the most amazing social media experiments ever," in a post on LinkedIn, which has since been edited to backtrack some of his initial claims.

He said that Alex had given permission for his photo to be taken and that the company asked a Twitter user in London to tweet it.

But Alex and the Twitter user, @auscalum, deny knowing anything about the company. Alex posted this on Twitter last night:

And @auscalum tweeted this:

When asked for proof of Breakr's involvement in the stunt Tuesday, Leonares told Mashable: "The conversation between @auscalum and us has be deleted. I should have screen-shotted it but she does not work for us. We just reached out to her to post the picture."

But @auscalum says she found the photo on Tumblr.

A community contributor for BuzzFeed scrubbed the internet and discovered that the first person to post the photo was Twitter user @brooklynjreiff.

"Brooklyn R., from Prosper, Texas, says she snapped a photo of #AlexFromTarget after her best friend, Alanna P., went to the same Target store (4885 Eldorado Pkwy in Frisco, TX) that day and dished about how 'GORGEOUS' he was," BuzzFeed reports.

Breakr now claims that it promoted the hashtag #AlexfromTarget using its army of followers. But that seems unlikely, considering Breakr only has 1,291 followers on Twitter.

Target has denied any involvement in the stunt.

We reached out to Breakr for comment.

In an interview on "The Ellen Degeneres Show" Tuesday, Alex, 16, said his manager at Target first alerted him that his photo was going viral on the Internet.

"I thought it was fake," he said. "Then about an hour later these random girls I had never met before came in and showed me my Twitter page and I had like 5,000 more followers — and I was just really confused."